Hillary’s Huge Estate-Tax Hike

“Hillary Clinton Proposes 65% Top Rate for Estate Tax” blared a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Since the current top statutory tax rate on estates is 40 percent, Clinton’s proposal is nothing if not audacious. I can’t recall Barack Obama, our most left-leaning president, ever calling for a 65 percent increase in tax rates for the rich.

Going after inheritances and estates is textbook Marxism. That is not an exaggeration. The third plank in Karl Marx’s 10-point platform for achieving socialism through democratic means — see his 1848 textbook to communism, The Communist Manifesto — was the abolition of inheritances. To repeat: it was point three in Marx’s 10-point plan.